Vivian Howard, a TV Chef, Offers Hope for Her Rural Hometown

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Vivian Howard, who spent her childhood plotting an escape from her rural eastern North Carolina county, has become an unlikely engine in its economic and cultural revival.CreditCreditDillon Deaton for The New York Times

KINSTON, N.C. — Just before Christmas, in the soup kitchen that serves this small town built on tobacco, textiles and hogs, the chef and cooking show star Vivian Howard finished stirring a pot of pork and sweet potato stew and turned to a local television reporter.

How does it feel, the reporter asked, to know that she had saved her hometown?

“If I had saved Kinston,“ she replied, “we wouldn’t need a food bank, and all these people wouldn’t be waiting for lunch.”

Ms. Howard, 38, has been called many things. Her mother calls her the life of the party. Her father calls her Big Time, a nickname from her childhood. A few of the 80 people she employs call her a control freak. But “hometown hero” may be the label that makes her most uncomfortable.

“Saving a town was not what I was trying to do,” she said. “I’m just a storyteller. A storyteller who cooks.”

Still, Ms. Howard, the girl who spent her childhood plotting an escape from this rural eastern North Carolina county, has become an unlikely engine in its economic and cultural revival.

Twelve years ago, when her family talked her into coming home to open a restaurant, she thought that somehow she had failed. Now, Ms. Howard is five seasons into “A Chef’s Life,” her popular public television show. Her restaurant, Chef & the Farmer, attracts talent from the best professional kitchens in the South; traveling food celebrities drop by to learn about the region. New restaurants, galleries and a brewery have come to town. The lady who taught her how to make biscuits can charge tourists $100 for a private lesson.

At first glance, the show seems an unlikely hit: a slow-rolling half-hour about running a restaurant, managing a family and how best to cook regional specialties like cabbage collards or flounder caught from the nearby Atlantic, or seasoning meat coaxed from the jowls and tails of pigs. Guests include the guy at the fish store, the neighbors who make collard kraut, and the farmer who sells the restaurant its vegetables.

But to many of the show’s three million fans, and to the guests who travel hundreds of miles to eat at her restaurant, Ms. Howard is a rural Princess Leia. In the wake of an election that laid bare the nation’s political, cultural and economic divisions, her life has a particular resonance with the kind of people who see her story as theirs.

“What I came to realize was that much of rural America feels forgotten and misunderstood and, frankly, hopeless,” Ms. Howard said. “Urban folks are afraid of rural folks, and rural folks are afraid of urban folks. On our show, we try to bridge the gap.”

She and her team paid for the first season, which aired in 2013, with a crowdsourcing campaign and a little money from organizations like the North Carolina Pork Council, Blue Cross Blue Shield and a group of civic leaders. The show was something of a Hail Mary pass for a region trying to find something to replace tobacco production and factory work.

“I like to call it more like ‘Waiting for Guffman,’” said Ben Knight, 40, Ms. Howard’s husband and the restaurant’s manager, who enjoys his own celebrity status among fans.

The show caught on, winning a Peabody Award and a daytime Emmy. Sponsorship is so robust that they can afford to pay some of the local residents who appear as guests.

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Damage in Deep Run, N.C., from the floodwaters of Hurricane Matthew last October.CreditDillon Deaton for The New York Times

On about any weekend night, most of the 220 diners who land a seat at her restaurant will be from somewhere else. Her parents, John and Scarlett, are regulars. After they eat, they’ll take a spin through the parking to count the out-of-state license plates.

“It’s the darn craziest thing I have ever seen,” John Howard said. “People will drive 300 miles for a meal.” (As one of the state’s largest commodity hog producers, he also can’t believe the price his daughter pays for local, pasture-raised pork.)

On a recent night, Sarah Reichard, 35, arrived for dinner with her husband, Mitch MacDougall, 34. The vacationing Maryland couple had brought a copy of Ms. Howard’s best-selling new book, “Deep Run Roots,” neatly annotated, with sticky notes marking their favorite recipes. At 564 pages, the book is both an important catalog of the unique cooking style of coastal North Carolina and a record of the emotional journey of a young woman who grew up feeling disenfranchised and ashamed of her people.

Ms. Reichard, who was raised in a small Pennsylvania town, trembled as she spoke with Ms. Howard. “She talks about things I feel all the time,” she said. “I hate where I’m from, too.”

From as early as she can remember, Ms. Howard had wanted to get out of Deep Run, the slip of a community near Kinston where she was born. She was in boarding school by 14, then headed to North Carolina State, where she dreamed of becoming a journalist. She moved to New York, burned out at an advertising agency, and stumbled into a waitressing job at Voyage, a globally influenced Southern-style restaurant in the West Village.

There, she fell in love with a co-worker, Mr. Knight, 40, an artist who paints large abstract works with glossy acrylics. She attended the Institute of Culinary Education, interned at Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50, and cooked on the line at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market.

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Ms. Howard’s restaurant, Chef & the Farmer, attracts talent from the best professional kitchens in the South; traveling food celebrities drop by to learn about the region.CreditDillon Deaton for The New York Times

The couple were selling soup from their Harlem apartment when her brother-in-law asked them to come home to Kinston and open a restaurant in the building he had bought in the faded downtown district.

They moved in 2005, happy to be out of New York, living rent-free and child-free in a little house on the river that her father calls his nap shack, and finding their way in the community.

Still, the economic reality was grim. Hurricane Floyd had ravaged the region six years earlier. The tobacco warehouses and shirt factories had long been shut down, and the DuPont polyester plant was a shadow of its former self. “Everyone here had an excuse for why they hadn’t left yet,” Ms. Howard said. “I was like, ‘I should be ashamed of this place, too.’”

In what seemed to many a foolish move, they opened Chef & the Farmer. At first, they served fancy city food. She remembers the day her sister pointed out that three of the four desserts had vegetables in them, and that didn’t mean carrot cake.

“I was cooking down to people,” Ms. Howard said. “I didn’t feel like these people had anything to teach me.”

She decided to embrace the local dishes she had grown up eating. She could elevate the wild muscadine grapes, the slow-simmered butter beans and the “tom thumbs” — air-dried pork sausages whose casings are made from pig appendixes. In the process, she elevated herself. She came to consider the people in her town as guides to a stronger, simpler way of living.

Buoyed by the increased interest in Southern cooking and a few good mentions in the regional press, she persuaded the documentary filmmaker Cynthia Hill to make a TV show. Ms. Hill had grown up seven miles away from Ms. Howard, and she understood the desire to leave a place and then come home again.

“Initially, I think she was just trying to save herself,” Ms. Hill said. “In the process, she is saving a lot of people.”

The show has started a sort of renaissance in the town, where a local investor has opened a boutique hotel and the well-regarded Mother Earth brewing company and taproom. Storefronts are being refurbished. The couple has opened an oyster bar and burger joint called the Boiler Room across the alley, and are planning a bakery.

“I don’t think she realized this was all going to happen, but right now she’s the hometown girl that made good and came back, which gives her some cachet,” said Bill Smith, a chef and Southern food authority who grew up in the area. Mr. Smith appeared on a recent holiday special, helping Ms. Howard and her neighbors kill a pig and make corned ham from it.

Not everyone, however, is entirely enamored of the food. Grayson Haver Currin, until recently a longtime editor at Indy Week, an alternative paper published in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle, thinks chefs like Sean Brock in Charleston, S.C., and Ashley Christensen in Raleigh do a better job interpreting the traditional Southern culinary canon for modern eaters.

“That said, in Kinston it’s kind of eye-popping that food like that exists,” Mr. Currin said. “The story of that family and what they’ve accomplished in small-town, postindustrial America is fascinating. But it’s a slow process and it’s a limited process. No matter how many $20-a-plate restaurants you put in that town, you can’t change the economics and racial realities.”

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Ms. Howard on her father’s farm in Deep Run, where she spent her young childhood.CreditDillon Deaton for The New York Times

The average annual income in Lenoir County, which has about 58,000 people, is $20,191. In Kinston, the county’s most populous community, almost 70 percent of the residents are black, while most of its elected leadership is white. At the fish store and the Piggly Wiggly, black customers didn’t seem to know about Ms. Howard’s show or her restaurant. The managers, who were white, did.

The region’s troubles only got worse in October, when floodwaters brought on by Hurricane Matthew devastated the community. Four died, bridges were washed away, and roads were closed for weeks. Four of the six hotels in the town flooded, and more than 3,200 people applied for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Ms. Howard was on her book tour when the hurricane hit Kinston. Her marketing plan was to tour 24 cities in a tricked-out food truck. For $50, people got a book and a simple supper, like a bowl of eastern North Carolina fish stew and eggs, built from chunks of fish layered with potatoes and onions and flavored with onions, tomato paste and chile flakes.

All but one event sold out. Fans lined up to tell Ms. Howard about their mothers who, like hers, suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. Ms. Howard’s young twins are sometimes on the show, which led to a parade of parents eager to discuss their own twins. Chelsie and Jono Brymer, a young couple from Trenton, Mich., drove to Chicago just to see her. They, too, had moved back home, to a struggling former steel town, to open a little French cafe called Promenade Artisan Foods.

“We watched the show and realized we were not the only ones who ask ourselves if we were crazy to do it,” Ms. Brymer said.

By the time she returned home, Ms. Howard was exhausted. From the road, she had organized a statewide fish stew fund-raiser for flood victims that raised more than $30,000. She had shaken hands with so many strangers that she felt like a politician. She had seen her 5-year-old twins, Florence and Theodore, maybe four times during the tour.

Ms. Howard vowed to stay home more, tending both to the children and to the restaurant in a more balanced way. There would be no more T-shirts with her face on them, and less energy spent on expanding her line of sauces and rubs. And Ms. Howard is changing the show, now shooting its fifth season. It will still be set in eastern North Carolina, but it will shift the focus to the people in her life who cook food from other cultures.

“There’s only one of me,” she said, “and I have to decide what I want to do.”